This invention deals with allowing certain people, such as families, friends and attorneys, to communicate with an inmate in a correctional institution utilizing a variety of messaging forms when direct telephone contact or personal visits are deemed untimely, expensive or cannot be conducted.
Inmates at correctional facilities are typically allowed visitors at scheduled times with controlled visiting hours. Families sometimes find it difficult to travel frequently to the institution for visits and foreign inmates sometimes never receive visitors. Depending upon the facility, it is also deemed difficult to escort an inmate and/or deliver items to them.
Inmates may be allowed outward telephone calls billed on a collect call basis to the called party (U.S. Pat. No. 4,935,956), or may have a prepaid method of billing, paid for by the inmate. Collect and prepaid inmate calls are generally very expensive with a large portion of the gross revenues for inmate calls given to the prisons as commissions by the service provider. A service provider may be a large telephone company or other independent company. Service providers install the telephone equipment and maintain it for the length of a contract, generally 3-5 years or more. They are also responsible for billing and collecting the monies for collect calls. They make their money by completing the call as a 1+ direct dialed call but billing it at high operator assisted collect call rates which can reach as high as over $5.00 for the first minute and $0.89 a minute thereafter. Collect call billing has to be collected from the called party generally by their local telephone company. Fraud and non-payments can run as high as 30-40% if fraud control measures are not invoked by the service provider.
Institutions generally leave fraud resolutions to the service provider and collect a fixed commission on the gross billed revenues. The commission rate is frequently the highest priority in determining the service provider in the institution""s public bidding process.
Inmate families complain about the high cost of inmate calls. Many people who receive calls or call attempts from inmates desire to have their telephone numbers blocked for various reasons, and the service providers block many numbers that do not pay their collect call telephone bills or that cannot be billed for calls, such as payphones.
Inmate telephone calling completion rates typically are only 30-35% of all attempted calls which indicates that many called parties are not at home during the restricted hours that inmate are allowed to make calls or that inmates simply call anybody, anytime and hope to complete a call. Inmates continually attempt ways to break or fraud the system resulting in many new restrictive feature enhancements over time. Furthermore, international calls may be prohibited entirely if the correctional facility so imposes, which may be because there is no method of collection for collect calls with foreign telephone companies or the current inmate telephone system doesn""t allow prepaid calls. Furthermore, many indigent inmates do not have the money for prepaid calls or the institution does not provide prepaid services because of the administrative overhead associated with assigning a PIN number and managing the accounting aspect of prepaid calls,
No inbound electronic communications to inmates is permitted today because of security reasons. There are a variety of methods of communicating via messages that may help solve the high cost problem of inmate calls and the inability to complete a telephone conversation or arrange a personal visit.
Voice message systems (U.S. Pat. No. 4,652,700) are common in all walks of life except in the corrections industry, as is the explosion of email communications via the Internet. Many telephone systems have integrated voice mail systems or adjunct versions and can accept data messages such as email and fax. These versions almost never restrict message volume or content of incoming or outgoing messages, or who can leave a message, and almost never reverse the charges to the remote party. Email systems are restricted by who has an email address at a facility, but restricting who can send a message or editing of these messages to eliminate certain words or subjects is generally never performed. Some systems exist that allow combining email text-to-speech and voice messages, but without the types of controls correctional facilities desire. Message delivery systems (U.S. Pat. No. 4,766,604) are available but not very popular because of the difficulty of reaching the party or in dealing with an answering machine.
Wordspotting (U.S. Pat. No. 5,199,077) is a method to help control the content of recorded voice mail messages. This process is becoming more reliable as technology improves. Wordspotting can assist in searching recorded voice mail messages for certain words or subject matter that institutional investigators want to be informed about, but results can be extremely poor in many environments. The technology is still being perfected.
A system does not exist that embodies these elements together in one system, i.e. message delivery, message deposits, email sending and receiving either audibly or in text form, with the restrictive calling rules correctional facilities are generally requiring.
This invention provides a methodology of communicating via message format with restrictive controls that can be billed in an economical manner that can still generate revenues for the correctional facilities and lower rates for the families. Increased messages may also provide a form of rehabilitation for loved ones which is another common complaint. While some people feel that no communications with people who break the law should be the norm, others feel that most inmates have to have some form of outside contact to help them rehabilitate and endure the incarceration period, providing hope for the future when they are released.
Correctional facility inmate telephone economics has not been a large subject of study, but it has been proven in other economies that if more forms of communications are allowed, information flow and revenues increase. Some service providers have expressed concern that such a messaging system could significantly reduce the existing telephone call revenues. There is fear that inmates will use more communications to continue their crime life behind bars. Messaging systems may actually provide more security measures than direct dialed telephone conversations that are in real time.
This invention provides a means to address these opportunities and concerns with flexible hardware and software elements.
Accordingly, several objects and advantages of this invention are that inmates can utilize new methods of communicating with outside friends or family members with the same or enhanced screening methods found in today""s inmate telephone systems resulting in easing the complaints of inmate families as to cost and accessibility. Geographical boundary restrictions of telephone calls can be overcome by the fact that messages can be picked up or left by external parties who may be located anywhere in the world. Inmates from foreign countries consequently can communicate frequently with parties located up to 12 time zones away. Furthermore, with the explosion of email messages, controlled and edited emails can be exchanged with people world wide, with text-to-speech conversion when inmates do not have access to computer terminals. The invention expands the methods of communications to and from inmates, can solve some of the family complaints of desiring more frequent and lower priced communications and can satisfy the security requirements of the correctional facilities.
The invention provides a computerized system that allows inmates of correctional institutions to communicate with parties outside the facility via telephonic or electronic messaging without the parties having to communicate with each other in real time and/or over the same communication connection. Embodiments of the invention provide a computerized system that administers billing for the communications and controls who the inmates can communicate with and/or from whom the inmates can receive communications. The system may further provide content editing and also control the frequency of communications, the length of messages, and the manner of alerting a party to a new message or the receipt of a previously sent message.
Embodiments of the invention provide a computerized telecommunications system that controls a plurality of message communication types originating from and/or received by inmates in a correctional institution. Each inmate has a personal identification number (xe2x80x9cPINxe2x80x9d) and/or email address. In at least one embodiment, the system screens messages using an xe2x80x9callowed call listxe2x80x9d of telephone numbers and/or email addresses associated with the PIN. The allowed call list comprises those numbers or addresses that the inmate may send and/or receive messages. Further screening options include using the inbound caller-ID or Automatic Number Identification (xe2x80x9cANIxe2x80x9d) information obtained automatically from the inbound telephone call, matching the inbound ID with an xe2x80x9callowed ID listxe2x80x9d for each PIN number that identifies the caller""s telephone number and location ID to allow a message to be completed. Still further screening options include an xe2x80x9cactivity guardxe2x80x9d process whereby if the message count for the PIN exceeds a certain quantity within a certain time frame, or whereby if the message count from a particular inbound party exceeds a certain quantity within a certain time frame, message communications will not be allowed.
In another embodiment of the invention, a voice mailbox is automatically created for each xe2x80x9callowed call listxe2x80x9d entry such that the entry""s associated party (e.g., an inmate""s family) may then call into the system via any one of a plurality of telephone circuits and access a mailbox to retrieve a message from a PIN holder, or leave a message for a PIN holder (e.g., the inmate relative). Accordingly, multiple mailboxes may be created for the same entry if the entry appears in more than one inmate""s xe2x80x9callowed call list.xe2x80x9d
In a further embodiment of the invention, all messages are recorded in a digital media format for archival purposes. Trained system personnel may search and retrieve messages using a plurality of search keys such as by PIN, date, and time. The system may prevent the playback of the messages from sources class-marked as xe2x80x9cprivileged,xe2x80x9d such as attorney-client privilege messages. For these messages, once a message is delivered and reviewed, it may be automatically deleted.
In another embodiment of the invention, an inmate is alerted that new messages have been received using at least one of a plurality of alerting methods. Some alerting methods occur when the inmate attempts to use the institutional telephone system. For example, an audio alert or prompt informs the inmate of new and/or old stored message(s). Another inmate alerting method comprises sending a signal to a closed circuit TV system that places the message alert on one or more TV screens in the institution, or to other types of electronic notification units located within the institution, and yet another method of alerting the inmate comprises sending a signal to a paging unit that pages an inmate.
A further embodiment of the invention comprises allowing the inmate to listen to the messages that have been stored for a PIN number once those messages have passed the screening tests. In this embodiment, the email messages may be converted to audio using a text-to-speech conversion process.
A still further embodiment of the invention pertains to the billing of messages. In one method, the messages are billed on a prepaid basis, with the charge for each message being subtracted from a previously established account balance for the PIN. The email messages have a fixed or variable charge based on character or word count, for example. If the prepaid account balance reaches zero, the messages will be blocked. In another method, message billing is performed on a collect-call basis that comprises validating a calling or recipient party""s telephone number or email-to-telephone number conversion against a blocked billing number database(s) to determine if the telephone number is in the blocked billing number list. The method uses a negative list such as xe2x80x9cLIDBxe2x80x9d (the Line Identification Database, a validation database for caller ID, calling cards, and collect calls), then creates a data record for each message put into a format, such as the Exchange Message Interface (xe2x80x9cEMIxe2x80x9d), that is sent to a telephone company or third-party billing service for collection.
In another embodiment of the invention, an inmate originates a voice message by entering a PIN number or employing voice print recognition to identify the inmate, speaking or entering a recipient""s telephone number, recording a recipient""s name as a label, and then recording a message. A plurality of methods may be used to alert the recipient that a message has been left or that a message stored in the system is awaiting delivery to its intended recipient. Alerting methods include paging system notification, email notification, and alerting being via an outbound automated telephone voice announcement or a fax delivered to a predetermined number.
In a still further embodiment of the invention, the intended recipient may retrieve a deposited message by calling the system""s telephone number, entering a combination of his/her own telephone number and the inmate""s PIN number and/or other unique access codes. Alternatively, the recipient may retrieve messages by speaking the numbers or codes using speech recognition techniques to convert the speech into system recognizable numbers. This method may optionally use the ANI/Caller-ID information for verification to pickup the message.
In another embodiment of the invention, the system scans voice messages using a wordspotting process that detects certain key word utterances. If key words are detected, then an alert to institutional officials is performed. The system may send incoming or outgoing email messages using similar screening techniques to those applied to voicemail messages. Incoming emails are delivered to a workstation if the inmate""s PIN number class of service so specifies, with text editing of the emails performed to restrict certain words or subject matter that may be in a xe2x80x9crestricted word listxe2x80x9d in the system. Accordingly, only screened text messages are communicated in this embodiment of the invention